By the way, if you think botnets are intriguing, you’ll enjoy this post by Google software engineer Neil Daswani. It’s about a recent USENIX paper (PDF link) in which Neil and other Googlers talk about Clickbot.A, which was a bot that clicked on Google ads last year.
The high-order bit is that “Google identified all clicks on its ads exhibiting Clickbot.A-like patterns and marked them as invalid,” but you may want to read the full paper if you’re interested. At the end, they even show one version of the source code of the botmaster. The attacker apparently left a backup file lying around, so you can see that functions are named things like “ThisIPIsClick()”. I thought the paper was a fun read.


Dissecting Clickbot.A - Read More...